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" Every time you read a poem aloud to yourself in the presence of others, you are reading it into yourself and them. Voice helps to carry words farther and deeper than the eye. "

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" The kinds of truth that art gives us many, many times are small truths. They don't have the resonance of an encyclical from the Pope stating an eternal truth, but they partake of the quality of eternity. There is a sort of timeless delight in them. "

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" The experiment of poetry, as far as I am concerned, happens when the poem carries you beyond where you could have reasonably expected to go. "

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" Write whatever you like! "

" Poetry is more a threshold than a path. "

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" The problem as you get older... is that you become more self-aware. At the same time, you have to surprise yourself. There's no way of arranging the surprise, so it is tricky. "

" My experience is that prose usually equals duty - last minute, overdue-deadline stuff or a panic lecture to be written. "

" A person from Northern Ireland is naturally cautious. "

" Sonnet is about movement in a form. "

" You yourself don't have to be shaken by mortal danger in order to feel your mortality. "

" Poems that come swiftly are usually the ones that you keep. "

" I've always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward. "

" When I first encountered the name of the city of Stockholm, I little thought that I would ever visit it, never mind end up being welcomed to it as a guest of the Swedish Academy and the Nobel Foundation. "

" In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself. "

" My passport's green. "

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" I feel myself part of something. Not only being part of a community but part of an actual moment and a movement of Irish writing and art. That sense of being part of the whole thing is the deepest joy. "

" The faking of feelings is a sin against the imagination. "

" The murder of Sean Brown hurt my soul. "

" My father was a creature of the archaic world, really. He would have been entirely at home in a Gaelic hill-fort. His side of the family, and the houses I associate with his side of the family, belonged to a traditional rural Ireland. "

" I don't think my intelligence is naturally analytic or political. "

" I've said it before about the Nobel Prize: it's like being struck by a more or less benign avalanche. It was unexpected, unlooked for, and extraordinary. "

" My language and my sensibility are yearning to admit a kind of religious or transcendent dimension. But then there's the reality: there's no Heaven, no afterlife of the sort we were promised, and no personal God. "

" I think of the bog as a feminine goddess-ridden ground, rather like the territory of Ireland itself. "

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" One doesn't want one's identity coerced. "

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" There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you. "

" At home in Ireland, there's a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure. "

" Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it. "

" Poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead. "

" Eternal life can mean utter reverence for life itself. "

" I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center. "

" Anyone born and bred in Northern Ireland can't be too optimistic. "